By now we should have built ourselves a nice little network of blogs and content creators.  Hopefully you have been reading each other’s blogs, leaving comments, and contributing to an ongoing conversation, whatever that might be.  If you haven’t been, you should start doing so.

Now, let’s take some steps outside our micro blogosphere, and start connecting more with the WWW.

Discuss:

In this week’s reading, when discussing hypertexts Landow suggests his students “fall in through the living-room ceiling rather than entering through the front door.” (p 111).  Can you think of some examples examples of this in your own experience of reading stories online?  How do you navigate once you’re ‘in the living room’ straight away?

Exercise:

1. Set up a Hootsuite account, or a similar tool that allows you to co-ordinate multiple social media platforms at once.  If possible, connect your blog (mediafactory ones may not work), Twitter, and 1 other site (LinkedIn is a good idea, or another following on from what we did last week).  Some of you may find this useful, some maybe not – but either way it makes for a good blog entry!
2. Find 2-3 ‘stories’, articles or posts online about your area of interest, that have an interactive element – at least some hyperlinks, but hopefully more than that.  This can be anything; news articles, twitter threads, fiction, forums – anything that helps you engage more deeply with your topic – let’s call it ‘research’.  For each story, follow as many links as you can, and see where you end up.  Somewhere interesting? New? A dead end? New Zealand?  Blog it.

Suggested Blog entries:

• Blog about the class exercises
• If you found any interesting people, sites or communities during the exercise, definitely write about them!
• Think about hyperlinks – how might they work in still images, audio or video?  Can you find any examples?